


Sleeping with the enemy

by Metz



Category: Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Death Wish, Depression, F/M, Past Character Death, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-05
Updated: 2018-11-05
Packaged: 2019-08-19 11:44:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16533980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Metz/pseuds/Metz
Summary: From 2007: Another original female character, and this one is sexual. But that's as much a consequence of Vampire myths as anything else.Originally this was titled 'Tomorrow' and was meant to be part of an unwritten series of (small s) supernatural creatures in the Who universe called 'Blood and Time'.A tenth Doctor who wants to die and a Vampire who wants to live.





	1. Daine

 

_There is something in the air, something coming. It is like a whisper, a presence familiar but yet- different.  Not here. Not here surely. Daine senses pain, and senses trouble. Perhaps the time has come, after all._

**Daine**

 

The man with the knife is standing in front of the suited stranger, tense and angry. Daine has seen enough fights to know the knifeman will strike, and strike to kill.

“Do it,” the stranger says. “If you’re such a hard man, come on. “

As the knifeman lunges forwards, Daine acts. She grips the knifeman’s wrist, snapping bones as he drops to the floor, screaming. She picks up the knife, and leaves the man on his knees, whimpering as Duke drags him out.  _So it_ is _here and now_ , she thinks, turning to the stranger. She runs him into the wall, her arm across his throat, her other hand paused to strike with the knife.  “Do you remember?” she says. “Do you remember what I told you I would do if I ever saw you again?”

“Kill me?” he suggests.

“Give me one bloody good reason why I shouldn’t.”

He opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. “No, sorry, its gone.”

 _It would be easy now,_ she thinks. _An instinct as old as time itself, an instinct that demands of her what she has the power to do._

But she hesitates, feeling the cold in him., feeling the emptiness. The flicker of life in him she so hated- so desired- was gone. She has felt this before, seen it before. Beyond weariness, beyond doubt, beyond anything. It means one thing.

“You want to die,” she says.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “I want to drink.”

She lets him slump down onto the seat, and signals one of her staff to bring over the bottle of scotch. “I’m watching you,” she says.

And she does, as he sits in the corner drinking, - still and unheeding of everything around him. People come and go and he seems motionless, staring into nothing- or into infinity.

Last orders comes and goes, and the staff clean round him at her behest.  As quiet comes, she sits opposite him. He barely registers her.  He is haunted, haunted enough to walk into the territory of a woman who had vowed to kill him before. She owes him this moment out of centuries of respect.

“What do you want,” she says.

“We have unfinished business,” he says, pulling himself to his feet.

“You’re drunk,” she says.

For a moment he closes his eyes. “Now I’m sober. Let’s get this over with.”

“The old way?”

“If you prefer.” 

Daine walks to the bar, and from behind it she gets two swords. She throws one to him and he lets it drop to the floor.

“Pick it up,” she says.  “I will not kill an unarmed man, even you.”

“You have to,” he says.  “Everything you are tells you that you must.”

“I am evolved beyond that,” she says, but the blood sings to her.

He bends to pick up the sword and draws it, for a moment focusing on the blade. “Oh she is beautiful,” he says, almost unthinking, then focuses his attention back on Daine.

She strikes, he parries- on and on it goes, the blades singing. His heart isn’t in it, she can tell by the way he moves, each strike, each parry almost an afterthought, almost too late. Going through the motions. Years ago, years away, she had tried to yield to him, she had felt as he felt, and he had walked away. She would not. _This has to end_.

“Where’s your hatred?” she says.  “Where’s the righteous fire, your misplaced love? I am the shard of old evil, the old darkness, the killer of innocents- why are you holding back?”  He strikes, this time with more effort, and she only just moves in time. “Have too many people died because of you? How many thousands in the name of a higher cause? How many innocents do you hear screaming? Do you even know their names?”

“Shut up!” he says.

“Is their blood on your hands again?” she says. “You threaten my people, you threaten us who only kill to eat. What right do you have?”

“You are- evil.” He struggles with the word.  He strikes, she parries, strike parry strike parry.

“I just am,” she says, although she is losing the upper hand, and he dislodges the sword from her hands, sending it across the floor. He brings the sword down over her and she drops to her knees, reaching, catching the blade at the last second.  A slow trickle of blood runs from her fingers, down her wrists.

He is breathing hard, and she waits for him to press the advantage. Instead he drops the sword. “I just don’t care enough,” he says.  “Do what you want.”

As he turns his back on her she stands and says, “We are not finished.”

“Are we not?” he says, turning on her, his hand outstretched, pressing against her chest and forcing her back against the wall with will and pain.  _Expressionless_. “You are evil,” he says. “How can you be anything else? You think you have some right to exist- who gives you that right, to decide who lives, what gives anything that right? I should put a stop to you right here and right now, Daine.”

She struggles to speak, focus beyond the pain that feels like his fingers are halfway to her heart. “Who is it you are trying to hurt?” she says. “Whoever it is they must have damaged you pretty bad.”

She knows though, as she manages to grip his arm, forces him to his knees in front of her and draws her knife. It is himself he hates. He is no longer fighting. In one fluid motion she is on her knees behind him, snatching at his hair, knife to his throat.  She leans into him, her teeth grazing his neck. His blood calls to her. “Or is this what you want?”

“Do it,” he says.

She lets him go. “No.”

He turns to face her, desperate. “You have won,” he says. “You have defeated me, the last of your oldest enemy. Can’t you hear the blood racing, the blood that has slain your people for generations? Destroy me completely. Do it!”

She can taste him, taste the specialness, and sense the wonderful, giddying power. He kneels before her, his head bowed in surrender. Again ancient instincts surface, memories of a thousand battles.  She says his name and he looks up, coming to her, lying half in her lap unfastening his collar, exposing his throat. He is too far gone for fear. “Will it hurt?” he says.

“Yes,” Daine replies. It is bitter in her mind, a brutal birth in a distant alley.  “An agony like you have never known.”

“Good,” he says.  “It has to be better than this…” He closes his eyes.

She brushes her hands against his temples as he lies his head against her shoulder. His surrender is complete.  She can read him so clearly, his pain, his loss, his despair. The endless nothingness.  _What would she be taking?_ He opens his eyes and looks at her. “You…”

Daine is not sure where the realisation comes from, but it hits hard. “I can make you feel,” she says. Her mouth goes to his, her lips against his- all he can do is respond , awkwardly accepting the kiss. Then he pulls away, staring at her in bewildered horror, touching his lips in confusion. He looks at her, stunned, and then drags her back against him, kissing her with passion, and hunger. Crazy, desperate fire runs through her body as she holds him fiercely against her, caressing him roughly, dragging at his hair and his clothes. _That’s it_ , she thinks, _that’s it. Feel, damn you._

 “Oh, this is wrong,” he says.  “This is so completely wrong. Don’t stop.”

 “We … should… stop,” she says, but she cannot bear to stop touching him, cannot bear to step away now this is motion.

 He growls. “I don’t want to.”

Somehow she gets to her feet, drawing him with her, leading him. She never reaches her destination, as he presses her against the back of the bar. “Where do you think you’re going?” he asks, before his mouth is hard on hers, she is holding him, and he struggles to shed his coat.  His fingers run rough lines down her chest.

“Nowhere,” she says. She moves her hands against him, raking her fingers over his shoulders, clawing his shirt down to his elbows. “Do you like this?”

“I like this,“ he says, his lips on her throat. “I like this a lot.”

She knows it is a masque, an escape into need. But she hungers for this, for the sheer exhilaration of this union. His blood races through arteries and veins, pulsing against her skin. They stumble, shedding clothes, into a heap on the floor. He is giving himself no time to think, no time to question. There is no gentleness, only need, no softness, just the anger lying beneath it but Daine does not care.  His eyes are full of fire, his touch burns her, but she can’t stop now. Neither of them can.

They silently turn their backs on each other and dress, although she wonders what strange modesty drives it.  When she turns he is standing on the other side of the bar, propped up on one elbow, resting his forehead in his hand.  She reaches over to brush his fingers with her own.  He looks up- his eyes dark.  “I have to go,” he says.

 _Figures_. “Okay.”

And he is gone.  She watches empty space for a while, shakes her head, and begins to clear away the shattered glasses.


	2. Doctor

_I sit by the harbour , the sea calls to me.   I hide in the water, I need to breathe._

All about Eve: 'Martha’s harbour'

 

**Doctor**

 

_What have I done?_

He stands with his hands on the rail, looking into the water- like ink. He wants to fall into it, fall forever into the darkness. Part of him thinks he already has. His shoulders sting, the traces of her are still on his skin and his very being seems to both embrace and destroy them. He sees it in his mind, replaying with perfect accuracy, one moment stretched as long as he wants to , or condensed, a blink of an eye, nothing of consequence.

The vampire was nothing of consequence. The vampire, who owed her line of descent to an old enemy, who was a shard of the race who had so often raged against his own, an enemy with the patience of millennia.

Nothing is of any consequence.

He wants to feel something, other than this cold. Since he had lost _her,_ since he had failed in the thing he most wanted to do, he is alone.

Oh he’d tried. He’d tried to carry on, but the darkness had crept in so slowly, so pervasively he hadn’t even noticed until it was too late.

He looks down, blood runs over his hands, but is gone before it shatters the calm of the water beneath.  That was the last thing he had truly felt, a moment of pure and absolute focus, tearing apart the man who had taken away the one thing he had left in the universe. He may as well have torn himself apart at that same moment, scattering himself as dust.

He cannot remember what it was he had felt any more.

There had been people who cared, even things that cared. He did not want their concern. He did not need it. To many people dead, too many people threatened. Too many people to go away and leave the hollow shell whose reflection stares back at him out of the depth of the dock.

_I am not who I was._

He laughs. _When am ever who I was?_   He supposes he wanted, for a time, to define himself. Define himself by his enemies, to seek them out, every last one, and stop them. No time for prisoners.  He stands in battlefields, and fate seems to spare him every time, each bullet that misses, each explosion a fraction too slow to catch him. And he kills, because it is the only way, the only way to stop the pain. 

But even that has stopped helping. He doesn’t even feel the pain anymore.  Sometimes fragments of pain, maybe. Or maybe fragments of nothing, made sharp icicles by the cold.

 _You want to die_ , the Vampire had said. Did he? Not for the moment that suddenly he remembers, _wrapped by her body, her mouth on his, her hands on him, holding him_. . But before? And Now?  Had it come to that? Not simple death. A simple death wouldn’t end this, constant nothing.

He is running on an oil slick, running to stay upright, and he doesn’t even know why anymore. Because evil never goes away, no matter how hard he tries, and how much of it he destroys, and however many innocent people die, unknowing, on the altar of good. 

No if it is to be a death, it needs to be a complete one, the perfect death she had offered… before she had touched him. Before he had wanted - _No gentleness only need_ \- and taken - _no softness, just the anger lying beneath it -_ and used.

A slight breeze disturbs the surface of the water, dissolving his image. He feels he is going with it. The sky is turning pink with the coming of dawn.

A city away, something calls to him. But he does not hear it. He moves on, passing refuse collectors in the street, past the early commuters and scabrous pigeons, past children on their way to school.  Tires squeal as he crosses roads without looking, the air filled with taxi driver expletives.  He ignores it and walks on. The city is lurching awake, but he does not feel it.  He walks on, past cranes, and towers of glass, past the road accident and ignoring the pleas for help.  He walks until his feet burn, and the sun burns his face, and still he walks on.  He sits by the chemical plant, and watches the tides change, sweeping pollutants back to shore, washing the bodies of gulls against the beach. He watches the play of light on the discoloured water. And then he turns back, crossing graveyards of long forgotten names and following railway lines.  He laughs at the 18:15 to Euston as it races past him, whipping his coat in fury. 

When he returns to the city, there are flowers by the road where the accident was.  His fingers trace the name on the card.  _Brakes scream, a child cries, then  silence._ Deep inside, a shard of nothingness moves, trying to impale him. It barely scratches.  He looks up, to where the sun is sinking.

 _This has to end_.

Her expression gives nothing away when he steps into the club. He crosses the room, somehow people seem to step aside, although the place is packed.  As he draws level with her, she lifts up the hinged surface to let him through to her apartment behind the bar.   Her hand is on the hilt of her knife as she closes the door.  She has hesitated too long, and his hand goes to her waist.  Until this moment he did not know how this is was going to be. “ _Make me feel_ , Daine,” he says. “Make me feel again.”

She throws the knife aside, and he closes his eyes as she strokes his cheek. Her skin is cool, too cool against his but it soothes the heat of the sun. He sits on the bed, tumbling backwards as she brushes her hands over his shoulders and her lips are moving against his. _Wanted. Needed. Forbidden, Unthinkable_. He kisses her, deep, slow, exploring. He can feel himself shaking as she slips his shirt over his arms, as her fingers move over his chest, down over his belly, and her mouth teases at his throat.  _She could end this_ , he thinks. _End this now._   He breathes hard, holding her, touching her, guiding her, making her naked beside him. She pushes him down, linking her fingers with his. Her caress is slow, and he is aching for all of her as her coolness turns to heat, to gentle fire. He does not want to stop this, not ever. He opens his eyes, looking up at her as she fixes him with her own gaze, her eyes not leaving his as she takes him.  And then, oh, moving, and touching, and skin, and sex and pressing against him, holding, and kissing and the feel of her, and the taste of her he is delirious, and laughing. 

_I feel_ _._

He doesn’t recognize the noise he makes as he is overwhelmed.  Sensation fills him, something breaks inside his mind, and the laughter becomes tears of something like pain that she kisses from his eyes and holds as he weeps in the darkness.    
  
Far away something calls to him. But he does not hear it.  


End file.
